Don Pendleton - Justice Run

“What did he know?” asked the elderly man, a media mogul who owned two newspapers, three television stations and a book publishing operation.

Shrugging, Vogelsgang backed away from the large monitor and lowered himself into a leather chair. He knew what was coming and he wanted the best view possible. He responded to the old man’s question with silence.

After several seconds the old man’s face reddened. “Damn it,” he said, his voice growing louder, “what did he know? Did he know everything?”

Another shrug from Vogelsgang, who busied himself staring at his drink.

“He knew a few things,” Vogelsgang said finally. “He knew a surprising number of things for someone who’d come out of nowhere, a foreigner, in fact. He had credentials and experience, of course, but could barely speak the language.”

Vogelsgang turned his eyes up from his drink.

“He could barely speak German or French. Yet he pieced together so much information. He even started to tie me to the United Front. It was amazing, as though someone was feeding him information.” He paused and let his words sink in. “An insider, I mean.”

The woman, Katharina Rothschild, leaned away from the camera and licked her lips. “Do you know who hired him?” she asked, her voice husky.

“I have some ideas,” Vogelsgang said. “A hypothesis, really. Nothing more.”

He dipped an index finger into his drink and stirred it.

“It’s a bit early for a drink, I suppose. Still, I’m feeling good, feeling as though things are moving forward. A drink seems in order. I digress, though, Katharina. You’d asked me a question and I owe you an answer. No, I don’t know who hired our dead friend. My thought— My theory, if you will, is someone close to me hired him. Maybe someone who’s getting cold feet, someone who’s lost her sense of vision.”

He saw fear flicker in Rothschild’s eyes. “‘Her’?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Her. You said ‘her.’ Surely you don’t think I hired the man, do you?”

He made a dismissive gesture.

“Just a theory,” he said. “Okay, a little more than a theory, actually. We grabbed his cell phone and his laptop and scoured the hell out of those things. So it’s a theory based on evidence.”

The old man leaned toward his camera. “Katharina? Katharina, did you do as he says? Why would you do this?”

“I did no such thing!”

“Please, everyone, please calm down,” Vogelsgang said. “Let’s pull it together. Katharina, I admit it was a bit of a shock at first. However, now I want to thank you.”

Nacht, the construction executive, laughed derisively.

“Thank her?” he asked. “For betraying us? Have you lost your mind?”

Vogelsgang shook his head slowly. “Lost my mind? Quite the contrary. I feel as though I’ve gained it. For the first time in years, since I first began all the hard work on this, I’m really seeing how this works. See, I don’t... No, I can’t trust you people. I’ve suspected that for some time. And now you’ve proved me right. This thing I want to accomplish, this thing Europe and the world needs so badly, I must accomplish it by myself.”

“You’re throwing us out?” It was Nacht again. “Damn you, I’ve sunk millions into this! You can’t just toss us aside like this.”

“I appreciate your passion, Werner. It’s a business decision. Surely you of all people can appreciate that. Rest assured I’m not going to toss you aside or dissolve the partnership.”

“Well, what the devil are you talking about then?”

“It’s a liquidation.”

Nacht continued to protest as did the others. Vogelsgang pressed the mute button on his remote control and blissful silence fell over the room. He felt the anticipation building, a ticklish sensation in his stomach that spread to his groin.

The woman suddenly whipped her head to the side and appeared to gasp. She slapped a hand over her chest, as if to keep her heart from jumping out. Vogelsgang turned the volume back up just in time to hear a scream burst from her lips. From off screen, gunshots sounded and one slapped into her forehead, knocking her from her chair. His team would make sure it looked like a robbery, just as they’d made the detective’s murder look like a mugging.

Vogelsgang sat transfixed as the others died on-screen, one right after the next. A man togged in black, his face covered by a ski mask, jabbed a needle into the old man’s neck. His heart problems were common knowledge among friends, politicians and the financial press. Though he was ninety-three, he’d placed himself on a transplant list for a new heart.

He needn’t have bothered.

The syringe’s contents would result in a heart attack and be virtually undetectable in an autopsy.

In the other screen, Werner’s head was tilted to the right. Dead eyes stared at the camera, but his body was still. A black-suited figure stood behind the executive, still pulling on the rope looped around his neck. Vogelsgang’s mercenaries would make Werner’s death look like a suicide. A couple of his high-profile deals had gone south in the past few months, which would make suicide plausible.

Vogelsgang clicked a button on the remote control and the monitor went black.

The brush with the detective had been too close. He’d devoted too much time and money bringing this plan together to have it fall apart because of betrayal. There was too much at stake.

Looking up at the monitor, he focused on the image of the old man. Vogelsgang had known the man for decades. But looking at him now, he just felt cold. Vogelsgang knew he’d kill 100—hell, 1,000 more—just like this man to realize his vision.

Let the bloodletting begin.

CHAPTER ONE

Monaco

Present day

Jacques Dumond lived on an estate on the outskirts of Monte Carlo. A stone security wall surrounded the property, obscuring the grounds from passersby.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, was at the wheel of a black Jaguar sedan. He guided the vehicle past the front gate. Peering through the windshield, he studied a pair of men standing outside a wrought-iron gate that led into the estate.

Though he could see no weapons, Bolan assumed the grim-faced men were guards because they seemed more focused on their surroundings than interacting with each other. And the smaller of the two, a slim guy decked out in a black suit, was holding what appeared to be a two-way radio in his right hand. The other guy—dressed in jeans, a white shirt and an ill-fitting blue sport coat, his bald head glinting under the streetlights—fixed his gaze on Bolan’s car as it glided past. The Jaguar was outfitted with black-tinted windows that prevented the big man from seeing anything other than his reflection as Bolan wheeled by.

Leo Turrin was in the front passenger’s seat. He nodded at the man watching their car.

“The big guy is yours,” Turrin said. “I’ll take the little one.”

“Thanks.”

Bolan drove three more blocks, making sure he was well out of the guards’ sight before he turned right. He drove another two blocks before making another right and maneuvering around the rear of the estate.

Pulling the car up to a curb, the soldier’s mind reeled through key facts about his target.

Before falling from grace, Dumond had been a high-level French soldier who specialized in counterterrorism operations. After a decade he’d moved to the dark side. His business card read “security expert,” but in truth he worked as a mercenary and enforcer for some of the world’s most vicious regimes. He’d led death squads in Sudan and Sierra Leone, trained antigovernment killers in Colombia and provided muscle for Mexican drug cartels. A scrape in that country had cost him his left eye. Apparently, once he moved into his mid-forties, he’d decided it was easier to sell guns than wield them. He began selling arms to some of the same criminal regimes he’d once worked for. The experts back in Washington disagreed on his exact body count, but knew it was significant, at least two-thirds of it being women and children murdered in the world’s conflict zones.